Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
